When the actual change to survival of the fittest goes forward, will it be a buff or a nerf overall?

The awesome part is that we already have the information we need to figure this stuff out. We know what the actual effect is going to be (a shield based on AP/4) and how often it happens (100% on a crit). So we need to figure out how much damage we'll be taking from a boss, typically, how much damage we currently prevent, how much damage a Savage Defense system would prevent, and based on all of this figure out what our armor would have to be reduced to in order to prevent the same kind of damage + shield that our prior armor dealt with by itself.

Simple, right?

Oh, yeah, we also need some data points with armor, crit, AP and avoidance.

Not a problem :)

First off, we'll take 3 different sets of gear. The first is my current antitank set, which uses a lot of damage-related gear. The second is my generic tanking set that emphasizes avoidance. The third is the OMG max stam set that I don't actually like and can't personally use, since it requires JC.

We'll then make some assumptions about the boss. This boss does 50k damage physically every 1.5 seconds. This isn't quite patchwerk level; we'll get to him in a minute. This is more inline with something like Sartharion.

Shield is the 25% of AP, straight up. Uptime is what we would expect the uptime to be for a fight given an attack every GCD and a maul, based on the crit rate.

Reduction is the armor reduction against an 83 mob. Damage is what damage you take from one hit after armor and protector of the pack are factored in.

Shielded is what damage you would shield on average after 15 seconds, assuming your current crit rate. This assumes a 90% hit rate.

15sec damage is the amount of damage that you would expect to take every 15 seconds, assuming the listed avoidance value is correct. Why 15 seconds? Easy to figure out how many mauls and GCD attacks you'll put in with that.

Damage + shield is simply the 15sec damage + the shield. It represents what would happen if you took the same damage as before, but had a shield in it. In other words, what extra damage you would need to take to make a shield awesome.

new reduction is the % damage reduced from armor using the damage + shield. Or, how much damage you would need to reduce to keep the same amount of mitigation you had previously.

Finally, new armor is what the armor would have to be with a shield to keep basically the same incoming damage. And the ratio is how much of a nerf the armor would be.

Antitank

normal

stam

armor

35421

38505

36915

AP

7800

6846

6233

crit

0.4

0.35

0.3

avoidance

0.526

0.558

0.46

shield

1950

1711.5

1558.25

uptime

6.4

5.6

4.8

boss speed

1.5

1.5

1.5

boss damage

50000

50000

50000

reduction

68.04402951

69.83133841

68.93557423

damage

14060.62702

13274.2111

13668.34734

shielded

11232

8625.96

6731.64

15secdmg

66647.37206

58672.01306

73809.07563

damage+shield

77879.37206

67297.97306

80540.71563

new reduction

0.626585289

0.653959415

0.661023924

new armor

27913.32529

31437.39584

32439.25976

ratio

0.78804453

0.816449704

0.878755513

Predictably, the antitank set shines here; with the high crit rate and very high AP, the amount of damage that will be prevented over time is quite high. The armor can be reduced more than 20% and you'd still be taking about the same damage. The typical set takes a harder hit, which is no surprise, though it's still close to 20% - and the actual armor reduction is about the same, 7k. The stam set suffers the greatest, with no surprise. The poor AP and crit values make it much weaker for shields, and its lower armor means that it would need to have a small nerf only to stay the same.

Another example of a savage defense. OH YEAH!

Okay, what about Patchwerk offtanking? Patch hits for 80k damage every second. Yikes! Let's see how the shields fare there:

Antitank

normal

stam

armor

35421

38505

36915

AP

7800

6846

6233

crit

0.4

0.35

0.3

avoidance

0.526

0.558

0.46

shield

1950

1711.5

1558.25

uptime

6.4

5.6

4.8

boss speed

1

1

1

boss damage

80000

80000

80000

reduction

68.04402951

69.83133841

68.93557423

damage

22497.00323

21238.73776

21869.35574

shielded

11232

8625.96

6731.64

15secdmg

159953.6929

140812.8313

177141.7815

damage+shield

171185.6929

149438.7913

183873.4215

new reduction

0.658000709

0.679832563

0.677550818

new armor

32005.45176

35322.18896

34954.52459

ratio

0.903572789

0.917340318

0.946892174

armor loss

3415.548239

3182.811037

1960.475413

Big, big difference. The AT set still is best, but now the nerf must be very small. And on the stam set the nerf is basically wearing armor jewelry vs not. (this, by the way, should illustrate how big a difference the defender's code trinket can make). Lose anything more than 3k armor, and it'll be a nerf against the effectiveness we've had on Patchwerk.

Now, let's look at some nice, round numbers for Survival of the Fittest and make some guesses. Currently it provides 22/44/66% more armor on leather. Blizzard loves round numbers, so let's assume them.

A base ilvl 213 armor set provides 3480 armor from leather and cloth. This multiplies to 29866 armor with the current SotF bonus.

With a 16/33/50% boost, that changes to 26987, or a loss of 2878 armor. Hmm. That's still pretty decent, and with that value we'd still get a very slight buff for Patchwerk.

With a 11/22/33% boost, we'll have 23928 armor, or a loss of 5937 armor. Ouch. Well, if we're going against Patch we'll be hurting a bit more, but we're still pretty good if we went for a balanced tanking set. If we're stamina snobs we'll be hurting a bit more.

With a 10/20/30% change, we'll have only 23389 armor - or a 6476 loss. Really ouch.

Which is more likely? I suspect that it'll be the 11/22/33% change to start with. This would result in about a 20% loss to most people's armor and hurt bears deal with the max physical damage mobs a bit - but that's probably for the best. Patchwerk is exactly the sort of fight that blizzard likes to use as a gating fight, and if one class has a huge advantage over another (as druids really do here) it's not good for designing fights. Reducing armor quite a bit allows for inspiration to help bears for a while instead of butting them up against the armor cap.

So what about another example - multiple mob tanking? There's a lot of wrong information on how this will be a nerf to AoE mitigation, and really...they just don't understand how weak armor is when dealing with multiple small mobs. This is a bit different in the assumptions. In a 15-second period, when dealing with 4 or more mobs you can assume you're going to have a shield up every swipe and every other maul pretty much regardless of crit rate - so 13 shields in 15 seconds. You'll also be attacked a lot more than once every second. Let's take a 5-mob pull. These guys hit for 10k each - a decent value for elite mobs in raids and slightly more than most mobs in heroics. They each swing every 1.5 seconds, so their effective swing time is .3 seconds. And of course, they're lower level, so the armor reduction value is better ( we'll assume level 81). What kind of armor loss are we looking at there?

Antitank

normal

stam

armor

35421

38505

36915

AP

7800

6846

6233

crit

0.4

0.35

0.3

avoidance

0.526

0.558

0.46

shield

1950

1711.5

1558.25

uptime

13

13

13

boss speed

0.3

0.3

0.3

boss damage

10000

10000

10000

reduction

69.28855069

71.0358823

70.16060059

damage

2702.607539

2548.842358

2625.867148

shielded

25350

22249.5

20257.25

15secdmg

64051.79867

56329.41611

70898.413

damage+shield

89401.79867

78578.91611

91155.663

new reduction

0.571337751

0.595953743

0.61634822

new armor

20925.57184

23156.93709

25222.52612

ratio

0.590767393

0.601400782

0.683259545

armor loss

14495.42816

15348.06291

11692.47388

That's right - in order to do the same thing with a shield that you do currently on lower level mobs, if you're in the antitank gear, you'd need to be hit with a 14.5k armor nerfstick. That's how good those shields are against multiple targets. Now, 4 or 5 mobs is the sweet spot. What about 10? That makes the effective swing rate .15. That can't be that good, can it? I mean, shields have to give out some time, and you'll be taking a lot of unblocked hits...

Antitank

normal

stam

armor

35421

38505

36915

AP

7800

6846

6233

crit

0.4

0.35

0.3

avoidance

0.526

0.558

0.46

shield

1950

1711.5

1558.25

uptime

13

13

13

boss speed

0.15

0.15

0.15

boss damage

10000

10000

10000

reduction

69.28855069

71.0358823

70.16060059

damage

2702.607539

2548.842358

2625.867148

shielded

25350

22249.5

20257.25

15secdmg

128103.5973

112658.8322

141796.826

damage+shield

153453.5973

134908.3322

162054.076

new reduction

0.632111629

0.653156283

0.658977113

new armor

26975.98879

29565.34351

30337.96575

ratio

0.761581796

0.767831282

0.821833015

armor loss

8445.011211

8939.656489

6577.034253

Nope. Armor just isn't that good compared to a static reduction against multiple mobs. In case you were ever told that you were harder to heal in a heroic compared to a warrior or paladin, here's why: block is really, really strong against multiple targets that hit softly.

Fred Savage wants you to hit him softly.

So unless the armor nerf to SotF is huge, the benefit for mitigation against a lot of targets is going to be really good and an overall buff.

As I've said before, I was all for this change and seeing it makes me pretty excited. Especially for the antitank set; the antitank set basically transformed from a max damage offtank set that was a bit squishy to a really great set against multiple targets and quite decent against bigger mobs. I love that AP and crit will actually matter, and that the ilvl of gear may matter a bit less. I also love the notion that druids can value different sets for different purposes. And if it works against magical damage too? Oh, that's 6 kinds of awesome.

The only thing I'd really like is for this ability to be under user control. My wife doesn't like the randomness of the mitigation, and she's got a point; there's no way to predict whether you'll have a good string of crits or not. If instead savage defense gave you a shield charge when you got a crit, which you could use to put up an absorption shield at a later time at your command (off the GCD, of course), this would give the same overall functionality but allow druids to be less squishy when they wanted to be. It would also give some interactivity back to the bear, which would be stellar. It could be macroed to always be used if you didn't care, or you could use it when it really mattered for that extra oomph. But that would be significantly harder to code. :)

26 comments:

Regarding the randomness, it's the same as block. You can't really control when you block (outside of special abilities like Shield Block). But honestly, the Law of Large Numbers means that everything works out in the end.

Bears will take more damage when stunned. I already hate stunners because I'm not able to generate any aggro, while DPS still has AE fun with the group of enemies. Now bears will take more damage when stunned (due to the armour nerf). In the end this might lead to more deaths with big groups with stunners, since the healer has to concentrate more on the bear and probably has no time to heal the occasional DPS aggro puller.In the end this might lead to the bear being even less sought after for AE heavy instances, at least when stunners are involved.(I would have liked to see a buff to Thorns to help with passive aggro for such cases...)

The armour nerf will probably bring us much closer to Death Knights. Granted, I'm not as well equipped as one of our Death Knights in the guild, but it was a bit of a shock to me that he was pretty close to me in terms of armour and surpasses me in avoidance, due to having dodge and parry. Of course Death Knights cannot block, so it'll be interesting what the end result is.

As some have already mentioned, this will be a huge buff against casters.

Paranoia mode activated:Maybe the threat nerf that some of us are seeing was an intentional way of pushing us into tanking with damage gear. That way we are already mainly using the gear that profits most from the planned changes once they go live.

Maybe Blizzard actually does listen to some of the people on the forums, since I'm pretty sure I've read a comment of somehow using crit and AP for mitigation.

Great write up Kalon, what a lot of fun it is predicting what might happen when you dont know. I take it all in that spirit. Personally, I'm most happy that we get to value more stats, which opens up gearing options and loot-lusts yet undreamed of. I'm all for making it more complex - to tell the truth, druid tanking is just a little too easy these days, isnt it? And yes, a reactive use of a shield would be so much more fun, and demand much more of players. Hope they come up with a nice graphic for it.

well if it works against casters then yeah it will be fun. however pvp will take an bit of a dent.

already i start havving some doubths. the shield is tied to an offensive ability .. fine and dandy but what if we can't be offensive? like when you are stunned(like some sugested) or not in range or the target is immune? to be honest only stunned is tied to tanking .. but it still applies.

there may be also a flip side to this you know. like you can absorb a hit from behind ;)

you have to admit thow .. they did surprise us.I'm however confused on this part: We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.are they unhappy with high (pvp)burst? or low dps? cause i don't really get where they are going at.

Why do you see stuns as such a big problem ?Warrior can't avoid/block a hit when stunned either.Plus druid has got more armor and barkskin on 1 minute cooldown which you can pretty much pop every or every second trash pull (also while stunned).

Hello there, I wanted to add to Olvar's post about Bear stuns. Ok, so, it seems that while we are stunned we cannot attack and tho the shield wont pop up, right? But must of PVE feral tanks nowadays have forgotten the Primal Tenacity talent. It reduces 30% incoming damage while stunned. And if ThinkTank, Olvar are right and these changes will go live, that means of wider (or if that talent will have a huge impact on mitigation, smaller?) variety of bear builds. And that "stun damage choice" really fits well with nowadays underestimated Primal Tenacity. (At least I, myself, don't use it and don't have any problems while MT'ing Naxx hc.)

Dont forget it's in blizzards best interest to ensure our spec gets better and better as time goes on. Sometimes ppl write as if blizzard are some big bad third party tinkerer who dont really understand what the honest raider has to go through on a nightly basis. They are in fact the EXACT same people who design the bosses & the trash. How convenient!!!

Funnily enough I met a top player from a top guild who was just depressed with the class the other day, and the changes made to it in wrath. He confessed to me that druids were 3rd class these days, outclassed by warrs & even pallies. Meeting such a prestigious player, I felt like a total noob for my childlike enthusiasm... why didnt I already know that?! I should have been nodding sagely in agreement instead of gushing on about how OP we are, and that we need to be nerfed.

Then I realized 1.9 seconds later that the guy just doesnt know what he's talking about. So much for top players in top guilds eh?

I have a bit of concern with this, and I can't tell if your numbers Kalon are accounting for it (cause I'm a theorycrafting noob). Please let me know.

With the mechanics of the Druid Shield, we have to attack in order for the shield to proc, and it only absorbs from one attack. Now, I'm assuming that even if a single swipe or maul crits on multiple targets, it's only going to create a single shield, due to buff overwriting.

So, if we are tanking 5+ mobs, we are being hit 5 times for every 1.5 sec GCD, but, only able to apply our new shield to 2 of those attacks, assuming you get a crit off both your swipe and maul. Is that a big concern, or am I looking at this all wrong?

In Multi-mob tanking, one Global CD will likely proc the shield. But because you have several mobs hitting you, there's a better chance that the shield will be used by the time your next Swipe goes off. So this shield is probably best for 3-5 mobs. Anything more than that and the shield won't do much of anything because it's already being used to it's fullest extent (once per CD).

Rohan, thanks for coming by. And yeah, it's the same as block (except for paladins, but whatever) but it's a very different feel compared to what druids have now.

Olvar - bears will absolutely take more damage when stunned. That's probably okay though, as all other classes do too. I think the threat nerf was an accident, honestly, and I still think it has something to do with swipe and some buff or debuff not working. Not that worried that they wanted us to go this route that much though...;)

Anon1 - having more things to do when tanking would be great. :)

Armin - it is tied to being offensive, and that does mean that some times (Sarth3D, Anub'rekhan) it won't work as well as armor. Other times it works far, far better though, and I think the times where you can't attack are small enough to where it won't be a significant disadvantage. I also was a bit surprised; I figured that they'd be doing some kind of block mechanic, but didn't think they'd tie it into hits or use crit as the block rating notion.

Anon2 - exactly. It makes bears not as good on stuns, but they're still better than all the other tanks. That seems fair.

Anon3 - if you spend 3 points in PT, I will beat you with a tire iron. Aside from it not actually working on Maexxna (it's not a stun, it's a stun-like mechanic) it's simply just a worthless talent for the vast majority of the time. Ulduar may change this ,but I doubt it.

Anon4 - the drawback of having the shield be removed with the first hit, statistically, doesn't matter assuming the mobs are doing enough damage to use the full shield's absorption. Taking one reduced hit and a bunch of non-reduced hits really isn't that big a deal; it's the overall damage over time you're taking that's important, and whether it's a bit less from many or a bunch less from one, it ends up being the same. The disadvantage would be if you were getting hit by a small attack first, which used up the shield, and then got hit with a big hit. In that case the shield would be more wasted. An example of this would be something like Sapphiron. But it's still probably not that big a deal, and since it works on magic damage (as far as we know...) it's absorbing damage that would have gone through anyway.

Peter, as I'm finding out on the official forums some people are going to be bitter no matter how good they have it. :p

Kosta, as I explained above it's not that big of a problem assuming the shield is fully used. Think of instead of SD having one shield, it's an always on ability that reduces every attack, but only reduces it by 2/5th of the current shield. Before you were having two shields in 1.5 seconds being used, then 3 hits that went through unshielded. Now you have 5 hits in 1.5 seconds that all got reduced. But in both cases, the overall damage reduced was the same, and as far as a healer was concerned you took the same damage.

The difference is, as I said, when an attack takes the shield but is fully stopped. The other difference is when you face a lot of mobs for whatever reason. In either case the damage will be a bit worse, but should still be better than armor. Armor really is crap for light hitting mob mitigation.

Mekias - the sweet spot is around 5 mobs, where you can reasonably guarantee a proc every swipe. After that it starts being not as good - but 'not as good' is still really, really strong compared to armor.

I think this change sounds pretty good for druids, especially for those, like myself, who kitty dps 90% of the time but have to jump into that OT position here and there.

The one thing that bothers me is a purely an aesthetic about the proposed ability. A shield sounds alot like a priest or paladin ablity that draws on the holy light. I would like to see this ability manifest itself in a more Druidic nature sort of way. Something like guardian wisps or a leafy green shield animmation. You get the idea where Im going what that,leave it to blizzard to hopefully make it fitting to the druid.

In relation to the shield vs multiple mobs, in the past shields have been very buggy against things that hit really fast. The shield has trouble telling who hit it first and last and ends up absorbing all of the attacks over a small interval. I hope they fixed that but it seems like that might be something fairly difficult to code effectively. Bugs like this would increase the effectiveness of the shield for multiple mobs.

Your numbers are off. Without analyzing them at length, you have the same uptime for a boss with a 1 second attack speed and a boss with a 1.5 second attack speed. Since shield procs are based on your critical hit frequency, higher boss attack speed necessitates lower shield uptime.

Since you hit (roughly) twice per 1.5 seconds, or once per second, depending on which way you round, a 40% crit rate, 50% avoidance yields something like an 85% uptime (though that's vs. a 2.0, so admittedly somewhat less vs. 1.5. Though I think 1.5 is rather faster than usual). I believe this would significantly increase the value of the ability and thus suggest a higher armor nerf. TBH I did not look at your numbers in depth after the clear uptime error (also I was slightly confused as to what your uptime numbers were intended to reflect).

Quellia - I kind of agree. A big glowy shield thing might suck unless they make it a super simian sphere (which: awesome) or they make it more druidy, and nature-like.

Anon5 - I am wondering about that. If it's like a lot of other .5 second shield timers, it's going to be really insane when it comes to fighting large chunks of mobs, and much better than this math indicates. It might make druids the best multimob tanks. It's hard to say.

Anon6 - the uptime isn't the time that a shield exists. It's simply how many shields you'll generate in a given time, assuming that the shields don't overwrite because you got lucky and assuming your crit rate. That's a big assumption against single targets, I agree, but it's not unreasonable. With that in mind the numbers should be a bit more reasonable.

I believe this will be a nerf for PvP, as we will crit less there and be stunned more. But I wonder also what this will do for us who are still in heroic gear or less. You have 7800 AP? I am at 3700 unbuffed, and when going a heroic with priest, rogue, warlock and mage it will not be much higher. Of course, I can try to persuade my friends to reroll better classes...

I've been gearing according to your pre-naxx gear guide (thank you a lot for that!) and if you have time I'd like to see what the numbers mean for that gear.

It seems that SD would make us a bit less spikey for healers, as it attenuates the damage in many cases.

How hard SotF is going to get nerfed is to be seen and is the difference between this change being a nerf or a buff.

Finally, at the end of the day, an active damage reduction ability is too much like Barkskin. If it were to happen, I suspect they would make it so that you can't activate them both. Along those lines, though, how about tying the shield in with Barkskin? You can collect "charges" that make Barkskin stronger.

Anon - that's a good idea - checking out how the shield is going to be at 80 blues vs end Naxx. I'll try and do that later this week. And yes, it should be a slight nerf to PvP, but I think that's probably acceptable given the huge buff ferals got in 308.

Nav - thanks for coming by. I think that it really won't make damage less spiky at all. Some times you won't get a shield, some times you'll get a bunch in a row. Compare this to armor and you'll have a lot spikier damage since it's very similar to avoidance in how much it occurs. What it does mean is that druids won't take as much damage, but it'll come in spikier intervals. At least on trash. On boss mobs the damage should be basically about the same, with potentially higher highs and lower lows.

And they've announced how it's going to be (or at least how much they want it to be now - it's a cut in half of SotF.

Yeah man I've been reading your stuff for a while now. Great reads for sure.

Here's how I was looking at it:Essentially you could divide the damage that we take into two categories: one is a baseline sustained damage that we take, the other is big spikey hits that don't happen as often. The spikey hits are what make my healers panic, while the baseline damage can be handled farily easily especially with diverse healing (i.e. HoTs stacked, direct heals coming in, etc).

So from this point of view, the nerfed armor raises the level of the baseline damage. We'll be taking more sustained damage on average. But those big spikes have a chance (equal to my crit) to be not quite as big. So from a healer's perspective, who is staring at my HP, those bigger hits are attenuated by a good chunk. Instead of a sudden 10k hit, I'll take an 8k hit. That would be less spikey for the healer. Realistically, the baseline damage is most likely handled by HoTs, melee chain heals and the like.

What you're saying makes sense too. So I'll have some thinking to do! :D

As for the SotF nerf, I believe the Blue couldn't quite recall the exact numbers and gave the numbers that are circulating now as an "assumption." I don't know if I should be hoping that the devs are crunching numbers or not at this point though. They've been overnerfing and overbuffing a lot, which kinda makes me feel like they don't know WTF they're doing. My favorite F-up is how for the longest time they insisted that warlock pets were fine and needed no buffs, then in a span of ONE patch they doubled their HP! Not a 20% or 30% buff, but doubled! Makes me want to ask what they were thinking all that time that they insisted warlock pets have sufficient HP.

Back on topic, the other thing that I find interesting is how your Antitank set actually shined. With dual specs only a few weeks away, it seems we may be able to overlap a lot of pieces between tanking and DPSing. Certainly a great change there.

Generally, I too prefer active skill-based abilities over procs such as this any day of the week. But then again, pretty much every possible buff that would mitigate/avoid damage has already been implemented. Barkskin reduces damage, Survival Instincts increases HP, Evasion increases dodge, Soul Link transfers damage to another entity, we can't block or parry, etc. It seems Blizzard have cornered themselves into coming up with unimaginative new ideas that stem from nothing but making some numbers add up. It's a bit sad because I don't expect this type of development from a company like Blizzard.

Despite the fact that we have less crits in pvp, resilience have no influence on talent/skill/trinket procs on crits.Only defense and talents which reduce crits are taken into account to know if you actually do a crit and proc something. Then resilience is applied to know whether the damage is a crit.

It was introduced due to the fact that resilience is only a damage reduction, not a spec killer for some specs which depends on crits more than other specs.

"That's a big assumption against single targets, I agree, but it's not unreasonable. With that in mind the numbers should be a bit more reasonable."

Yes. It is unreasonable. Over time, vs a single target, given decent avoidance, you will have numerous shields overwritten by new shields. On the other hand, you will avoid many unshielded attacks. The rates you use are, quite simply, not useful because they do not incorporate this fact.

Similarly, vs. multiple mobs you will have also have significant overwrites. Since you are working with about a 2 sec attack speed and a 1.5 sec GCD, factoring in a little bit of lag, you will often (if not pretty much always) have crits landing within half a second of each other. Not getting hit for half a second vs. 5 mobs is not an infrequent occurrence.

You also assumed basically heroic mobs. Most trash in heroic naxx (which I believe is the gear level you're using) hits for significantly more than 10k unmodified. Move 10K up to 15K and the relative value decreases dramatically.

Nicolai, thanks for writing. I think in this case you've gotten some very wrong information; I just logged into the PTR and Savage Defense still isn't trainable. GC mentioned earlier today that it won't be trainable for another patch or two.

Anon - thanks for writing. And yes, lacerate critting (and proccing SD) does work, and will increase the potential uptime. With the bugs that were reported in the PTR it's hard to say what the actual uptime is going to be, though.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.